Assembled from two separate books written by Che Guevara's father, this is a vivid and close-up account of the formative years of a revolutionary icon. Ernesto Guevara Lynch describes the people and personal events that shaped the development of his son's view of the world, from his childhood in a bourgeois Argentinean home to the moment he joined Castro to train for the invasion of Cuba in 1956. The book also includes, for the first time in the United States, Che's diary of his trip around Northern Argentina in 1950.

"The notebooks and letters Che sent home while touring South America as a worker and medical student—including those he wrote while preparing to invade Cuba with Fidel Castro—evoke a fervent mind almost as fond of family jokes and the study of allergies as he was of revolution."—Publishers Weekly